I want to thank my friend Mick in Colorado for the Byte today. He had sent this message to another list of his. His timing was perfect for the first day of spring – as until spring those of us in Minnesota don’t really want to know about the weather…

The NWS gridpoint forecast is an online tool that provides very specific weather forecasts. It takes a latitude and longitude to the nearest 0.02 of a degree and produces a 10 day forecast that maps to the modeling the weather service considering location and elevation.

To determine your latitude and longitude go to the web site below and fill in your address.

http://stevemorse.org/jcal/latlon.php

Open another web browser window to

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/ifps/gridpoint.php?site=gjt

…and scroll to the latitude/longitude field is at the bottom of the page.

Copy the decimal lat/long from the address conversion tool produces and paste that into the NWS Lat/Long tool. Make sure the longitude is a negative number.

Mick was able to get a forecast within about 1/2 mile of my house. The forecast has been fairly accurate in both temperature and precipitation ranges for my house. I have this forecast page bookmarked.

You can also use the Mapquest latitude/longitude tool to map how close the gridpoint forecast is to my house.

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/latlong.adp (Ann’s note I tried this and then visited “places nearby”, which was a very fun way to find home-run businesses in my area. Some I didn’t know about!)

This time I enter the latitude and longitude of the forecast gridpoint uses and view the map to see where that point is in relation to my house.